SumizAI vs Quillpad

What Quillpad is

What Quillpad is

Quillpad is an Android notes app created as a fork of the original Quillnote app, whose development stalled and whose backlog of pull requests was never cleared. The community showed strong interest in continuing the project, so this fork was created to pick up the baton where the original team had dropped it. It's one of those rare cases in the open source world where a project's abandonment by its original creators doesn't mean the end of the road, just a handoff to the community.

Key features

Quillpad combines notes and task management in a single app, letting users keep both freeform text notes and to-do lists without switching between two separate programs. Open source code under the GPL-3.0 license guarantees full transparency in how the app works and lets any interested developer audit it. Availability through F-Droid, alongside the standard Google Play Store, matters to users who prefer app stores free of the tracking and telemetry typical of commercial platforms. Being an actively developed fork means bug fixes and new features keep landing in the app, even though the original parent project has long stood still.

Who it's for

Quillpad appeals to Android users who used to rely on Quillnote and are looking to continue with their favorite app after the original project stopped being developed. Open source enthusiasts, for whom the GPL-3.0 license and F-Droid availability genuinely matter when choosing an app, will find a tool here that matches their values. People wanting a simple notebook combined with a task list, without the elaborate paid features typical of commercial competitors, will appreciate Quillpad's minimalist but functional approach.

Use cases

In practice, Quillpad works well for keeping a daily task list combined with contextual notes about those tasks — for example, a note with an order number next to a "pick up package from pickup point" entry. A former Quillnote user worried about losing access to security updates once the original project faded away can safely switch to Quillpad without changing their interface habits. Someone who prefers installing apps exclusively from F-Droid, for privacy-related reasons, finds a fully functional alternative here available outside Google Play.

Pricing and business model

Quillpad is completely free and open source, released under the GPL-3.0 license. The absence of any fees, ads, or premium plans is typical of projects run by a community of volunteer developers who took over maintaining the code without intending to build a commercial business on top of it.

Limitations and what to watch for

The app is Android-only, so iOS, Windows, and macOS users can't use it. Its status as a fork means dependence on the engagement of a small group of contributors — if their interest wanes, the project could share its predecessor's fate and also be abandoned.

AI notes on a task list

Quillpad has no built-in AI model integration, but anyone wanting to keep a fragment of a conversation with an assistant as an ai notes entry can simply paste it in as a plain text note alongside existing tasks. For people running a task list partly based on suggestions received from AI, that kind of manually moving content over as ai notes keeps everything in one place, though without an automatic saving mechanism straight from the conversation.

What's worth checking before choosing

Before switching to Quillpad from the original Quillnote, it's worth checking whether the app offers importing existing data without losing the structure of notes and tasks, and verifying the project's current activity level on its code repository to confirm development is genuinely ongoing.

Bottom line

Quillpad is a worthy successor to the abandoned Quillnote, combining notes and tasks in a single open source Android app. Anyone who wants ai notes from AI conversations to land there automatically instead of through manual copying should consider a tool built around that workflow.

Life after the parent project's death

Quillpad's history is an instructive example of how an open source license protects users from completely losing a tool they relied on daily. Had Quillnote been closed-source, its abandonment by the creators would have meant a slow fade — no updates, growing incompatibility risk with newer Android versions, and eventually total inability to install it. Thanks to the open code, the community could simply take over the project and keep developing it, preserving the familiar interface and data structure users had already grown accustomed to.

The role of small community contributions

Quillpad's development relies on small, scattered contributions from developers who spend their free time patching bugs or adding minor improvements. That model, while slower than a paid development team's work, has the advantage that the project isn't dependent on one company's business decisions, which could end its development at any moment for reasons unrelated to the product's actual quality.

F-Droid as a deliberate choice

Being available on F-Droid, an app repository independent of Google Play built around open source software, isn't accidental — it reflects a deliberate decision by the team maintaining Quillpad, mirroring the values of the community the project grew out of. Apps on F-Droid are compiled from openly available source code, free of closed tracking libraries, which for some users is a more important selection criterion than feature count or interface polish. For such users, choosing between Google Play and F-Droid can matter as much as the app's actual functionality.

Comparison with SumizAI

Quillpad and SumizAI differ fundamentally in both platform and content source. Quillpad is an Android notebook and task manager where content is typed in by hand. SumizAI generates ai notes directly from a conversation with an AI model — answers worth keeping land automatically as Markdown files in a vault the user owns, independent of platform. Anyone looking for a simple, open source notebook with tasks on Android will pick Quillpad; anyone who wants ai notes from AI conversations to arise without manual retyping will find SumizAI the better-fitting tool.

What SumizAI is

A note-taking application built around a conversation with an AI model. You ask a question, the answer streams back, and the answers worth keeping become Markdown notes — filed into a vault that is a folder on your own disk.

A vault is a directory holding base.md, a generated table of contents up to six levels deep, and a notes/ folder with one .md file per note. Before a note is written it is checked against the ones already there, so the fourth note about the same idea gets merged instead of added. Links between notes are ordinary Markdown links to files that exist.

The model is never ours: you bring your own API key to one of seven providers — Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Groq, OpenRouter, a local Ollama or your own server — and pay that provider directly. A question sends the table of contents plus at most five relevant notes within a 24,000-character budget, and the app shows you which five it used.

Every answer kept this way becomes one of these ai notes, ready to search again months later without hunting back through old chats.

Side by side

Where they differ

• AlternativeTo's description of Quillpad does not mention an AI model. That is the whole starting point in SumizAI: you have a conversation with a model on your own API key, and the answers worth keeping become notes without you filing them.
• Quillpad is open source (GPL-3.0), and SumizAI is not. If reading the source is what decides it for you, that is a real argument for Quillpad. The guarantee SumizAI offers instead is structural rather than legal: the notes are Markdown files in a folder you chose, so they open in any editor whether or not the application is running.
• AlternativeTo's description of Quillpad does not mention Markdown, so check what format your notes end up in before you fill it up. SumizAI writes standard .md files to a folder you picked, and an unpaid account can still export all of them.

Which one to pick